Accidental Favorites: The Implicit in the Study of Religion

Steven W Ramey [+-]

University of Alabama

Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program. His specialty is in contemporary issues surrounding identifications in India, which he addresses in his book Hindu, Sufi, or Sikh (Palgrave 2008), where he analyzes specifically the practices and contested definitions of communities identified as Sindhi Hindus. He has extended this analysis to reflect on issues in the academic and public discourse surrounding the category religion and issues of identifications in the United States and other contexts.

Description

“Accidental Favorites,” written by Steven Ramey, asks what scholars of the academic study of religion can do to reorder their teaching and research in light of a shift away from topical treatments of data towards critical assessments of processes of classification and identification. This “Afterword” offers final words of guidance that methodological applicability is difficult, daunting, and nearly impossible without reflexive recognition that the work done by scholars often plays favorites within contemporary culture wars. So what to do? As much inspired by the ideas giving purchase to this volume, while at the same time offering more guidance on how such ideas might find fertile methodological soil, the Afterword concludes by arguing for an attempt to avoid the many labels (i.e. Hindu/Sikh, black/white, religious/secular) that take such focus on the study of religion historically and today. Many scholars play “accidental favorites”—with their data, their discourses. Scholars of the academic study of religion, therefore, should be wary and cautious of their accidental favorites moving forward.

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